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Issue 10 - Spring / Summer 2005 Page 45 |
Truth and Politics of 9/11 - Omissions and Distortions of The 9/11 Commission Report
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The following transcript is an updated (and footnoted) speech by theologian Dr. David Ray Griffin, speaking at Santa Rosa, California, Oct. 3, 2004. He is introduced by Richard Heinberg, author of The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies.1
BY DAVID RAY GRIFFIN
Richard Heinberg: We’re fortunate to have with us today a courageous scholar who asks us some of the most important questions of the day in a clear, logical and dispassionate tone. David Ray Griffin was a Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Claremont School of Theology near Los Angeles, California for over 30 years. He is co-director of the Center for Process Studies there and the author or editor of over 20 books, including Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time and, most recently, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004), as well as The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions – a critique of the Kean-Zelikow Report (2005).2 Please join me in welcoming David Ray Griffin. (Applause.)
David Ray Griffin (DRG): Thank you. With regard to our topic today, "Truth and Politics", some people may wonder – people maybe outside this room – is there anything in the 9/11 Commission Report3 that is untrue? But now that I’ve finished my book the big question is, can I find a true sentence in the Report? (Applause.) That may sound extreme but if you don’t take it too literally and if you realize a sentence is part of a paragraph which is a part of an argument, then it’s hard to find any truth there. So what I’m going to do is just go through it and give you some examples.
The Kean/Zelikow Commission
You know we often name commissions after their leaders – so we have the Rumsfeld Commission on the space program and so on. Well quite often this commission is called the Kean Commission, but it should be called the Kean/Zelikow Commission, because the executive director was Philip Zelikow. He was a member of the Bush I administration. He got to know Condoleezza Rice very well there – they both served on the National Security Council. When they were between administrations during the Clinton years, they wrote a book together.4
When the Bush II administration was coming into power she brought him on to help with the transition and then he was appointed to the foreign advisory board, so he is essentially a member of the Bush White House. And yet, as executive director, he ran the Commission. He had a staff of 70-some; he decided which topics were worth looking into, and which ones were not. When people would come and say, I want to testify to the Commission, I have something important to say, he would decide who would take that testimony. And so on.
Let me give you one tiny example of how important that is. There is a new book out by Peter Lance, called Cover-Up,5 and Peter, good patriot that he is, went to testify because he had some important information about Ramzi Yousef – remember the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center?6 He was also the mastermind of the Bojinka Project which they discovered in Manila.7 Yousef also was the one who came up with the planes idea, that is, of using planes for weapons. So he was the mastermind.
Peter went to give testimony and his testimony was going to contradict some of the things that were in the prosecution’s case in 1996 when they prosecuted Ramzi Yousef. Who took Peter Lance’s testimony? Dietrich Snell, one of the two prosecutors of that trial. So that is an example of how the executive director could skew the proceedings.
Peter said he had a mole inside the Commission, somebody who was very unhappy with the staff, who was unhappy with the way things were going, and they would meet and he would tell Peter what was going on. He said that Zelikow just ran the whole Commission – that there were these leadership teams and seven out of the eight teams were completely controlled by Zelikow. Only one team (run by John Farmer) was not and they were butting heads all time.
There are other examples, like at the Commission hearing, people would say, "Tell us about the war games." Then they would ask the commissioners, "Why didn’t you deal with the war games?" and the commissioners said, "Well, we were told that was unimportant." Well, by whom were they told?
White House Investigating Itself
So essentially the 9/11 Commission was the White House investigating itself. Furthermore, as Peter points out, the staff – you know you think oh, you’ve got a staff there, it’s a bunch of people who know how to do research and they’ve probably got university students and so on. No. It’s ex-FBI, ex-CIA, ex-Department of Justice – nine members from the Department of Justice. They’ve got their friends back in there, so when you wonder why are no names named, you have people on their staff protecting their friends, protecting their institutions that they’re still proud of, or they want the public to have a good impression of.
So, from the very beginning this was a doomed commission. It was not a commission to get the truth. Once you realize that, these things won’t shock you quite as much. But even then, even knowing that, I was still shocked at the number of omissions and the audacity of some of the distortions. So let me go through some of these.
The Hijackers ... Some Still Alive
Starting right out on the very first pages they start telling you about the hijackers and they give you the names and in the middle of the book you can see their pictures. But they don’t tell you that at least six of those men are still alive. Some of them like Waleed Al Shehri walked into the US embassy and said, "Here I am, I’m not dead." And some of them were interviewed by the BBC and in London newspapers and nevertheless they are in there.8 And Waleed Al Shehri – they have him on Flight 11 and they say we believe he is one of the ones who stabbed some of the people on board. Just a total disregard of well-known facts – just omit the fact that there is any problem with the identity of the hijackers.
Likewise they failed to mention – and Daniel Hopsicker has written a whole book9 about it – that Mohamed Atta was not a devout Muslim. You know the image we have, here are these radical fundamentalist Muslims, they’re ready to meet their maker. Atta loved alcohol, pork and prostitutes. And the Commission says we’re puzzled, why did these guys go to Las Vegas, we’ve not found any credible reason? Well, they loved lap dances. (Laughter.)
Another alleged hijacker is Hani Hanjour and they tell us he was chosen to fly Flight 77, the one that was going to hit the Pentagon, because he was their best pilot. Hani Hanjour could not fly any kind of airplane. He would go up for his lessons and the next time the instructor wouldn’t go up with him, saying "You can’t fly." He was known as a horrible pilot, even with a little plane, and yet he was alleged to fly this Boeing 757 and make this amazing spiral, come down and come in at ground level at 400 miles an hour into the Pentagon. The best pilots in the world – some of them have looked at that – have said, I don’t think I could do that. Hani Hanjour could not fly.
This one they do mention: "As a former pilot, the President was struck by the apparent sophistication of the operation and some of the piloting, especially Hanjour’s high-speed dive into the Pentagon."10 (Laughter.)
The flight manifest: we’ve never publicly seen the flight manifest that shows that any of them – it’s not just the six – we don’t know that any of the 19 men named were actually on these flights. None of this is mentioned. It is not mentioned and refuted, it is just not mentioned. And that’s why I speak of omissions and some people call it the 9/11 Omissions Commission. (Laughter.)
David Ray Griffin was a Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Claremont School of Theology in California for 31 years. He is author and editor of over 25 books. (For where to obtain his books and DVDs click here) Copyright belongs to the author. All rights reserved.
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